Into the heart

This is an absorbing, thrilling account of an American anthropologist’s foray into the heart of the Amazon, where for twelve years he lived among the Yanomama, learned their language, was accepted into their world, fell in love with one of their women, then found himself in a harrowing life-and- death struggle to keep from losing her. When Ken Good first traveled down the Orinoco to the Amazon rain forest, he was a student of Napoleon Chagnon, the scholar who first introduced the world to those he called “the fierce people,” a Stone Age tribe who lived on hallucinogenic drugs and reveled in killing. The Yanomama were known as nomads who trekked through the forest in a perpetual hunt to satisfy their hunger; they were characterized as brutal and barbaric, proof that mankind in its natural state is anything but noble. INTO THE HEART is Good’s own eye-opening observations of the Yanomama, a description of a people so intense and vibrant that their world comes alive on the page. Good came to know them intimately: living as they lived, hanging his hammock alongside theirs, and chronicling their ways as completely as any outsider ever has. He tells us about the Yanomania’s methods of sur